They have been cast, like Burton and Taylor, in a variety of showy roles: as painters interested in reviving aspects of the art form in its most staid and
classical modes; as Marxist or Marcuseian critics of commodity culture and its discontents; as leering champions of youth movements and counter-culture
stylings; as
strict, detached, ironic appropriationists; and, finally, as sincere and romantic poets attendant on the tragedy of age's advancing degenerations of the body and of the melancholy states of nostalgia associated primarily with the waning of youthful beauty.